though he adds characteristically that any doctor is at liberty to do otherwise supposing his patients prefer it. The position of the public physicians, who were chosen and paid by a community, and therefore bound to receive no fees for their treatment, was a different one, though it is not clear whether they treated all the citizens or only the poor ones. These public physicians sometimes received very high salaries. Thus the physician Democedes, as public doctor at Aegina, received a salary of one talent (about £326); thereupon he was summoned to Athens with a salary of a hundred minae (£393), and in the following year the tyrant Polycrates, of Samos, invited him, probably to fill the post of public physician, not as his own private doctor, and gave him a salary of two talents (probably Attic talents, therefore £471). On the other hand we sometimes hear of rich physicians treating the poor free of charge. Specialists do not seem to have been common in ancient Greece, the same doctors treated external and internal complaints, and also men and women. It seems, however, from the oath of Hippocrates that there were specialists who undertook the operation of cutting for stone. Oculists were unknown till a later period, when the medical practice generally developed in various ways, and in particular the influence of gymnastics, and the dietetics connected therewith had a very important influence on medical methods. These physicians, although they at times made use of strange or “sympathetic” means of treatment, yet in general aimed at scientific methods, building on the knowledge handed down to them by their predecessors, and enriching it by their own experience and studies. On the other hand, the healing processes, to which the priests of the Aesculapian sanctuaries resorted, seem to have occupied a very doubtful position between empirical therapeutics and superstitious hocus-pocus. It had been a custom from ancient times for the priests of Aesculapius to practise the healing art. Their knowledge was supposed to be in part very ancient, handed down by the god himself, and in part divine revelation, which was continually renewed. Some of the sanctuaries of Aesculapius were renowned and visited beyond all others on account of their wonderful and successful cures, in particular Cos, Cnidus, Tricca, but especially Epidaurus, and afterwards also Pergamum. To these sanctuaries the invalids who sought healing went as pilgrims, just as people still go in Catholic countries to wonder-working shrines, and as in these we see countless memorials of successful cures, pictures and descriptions of diseases, wax or silver imitations of the part or limb that was healed, etc., so in ancient times thank-offerings were made to Aesculapius, sometimes in the shape of coin, sometimes also imitations of hands, legs, eyes, ears, and breasts, etc., in marble, silver, or gold, or else in simple wax or clay, together with the name of the person who found healing there.